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UN official calls for North Korea aid

17 June 2011 21:40 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. A senior United Nations official on Friday called for urgent aid to North Korea, pleading with international donors to overlook political difficulties in the face of a humanitarian crisis, APA reports quoting AFP.
Valerie Amos, head of the UN Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs, said of the estimated US$210 million needed to confront dire food shortages in the communist state, only about 15 percent had been pledged.
"In North Korea we’re facing a situation where about six million people are in danger of not getting enough to eat," Baroness Amos told AFP from Canberra.
"But because of the political situation in North Korea and because many countries don’t feel able to support aid to that country, it means that we are in a situation where people now... are only getting about 25 percent of the rations that we think are necessary for survival.
"We are really facing a very, very serious situation."
In Washington, the House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to bar US food aid to North Korea, with lawmakers charging that the assistance would prop up the communist regime instead of feeding the hungry.
Amos, who will meet with government officials in tsunami-hit Japan after leaving Australia, urged countries to recognise the humanitarian situation in North Korea.
"Any donors who would normally support a humanitarian crisis, we are asking all of these to look at this again and see whether or not they can support us here," the British official said.
"Politically it’s a very closed society, and we know of problems there in terms of governance, inclusivity and openness. But at the end of the day it is the people who are suffering who matter."
Amos said she had recently agreed to commit an additional US$7.2 million dollars from the UN’s central emergency response fund to North Korea.
"But I mean it is a drop in the ocean compared to what is required," she said.
Impoverished North Korea has requested overseas aid, with US relief groups that visited the country earlier this year saying people were again eating grass and tree bark.
Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans died in a famine in the 1990s.
But some South Korean officials are sceptical about the country’s current needs, saying North Korea wants to stockpile supplies for handouts to mark the 100th birth anniversary of its founder Kim Il-Sung next year.